


Slip Out Of Darkness

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:22:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Many things are unspoken in the life of a man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slip Out Of Darkness

_Many things are unspoken in the life of a man  
\- Edwin Morgan, The Second Life_

The first time Hank McCoy cut himself shaving, he was upside down, balancing on the palm of one hand, and reading Yeats out of the corner of his eye.

If he had taken the time to think about it, the cut, streaming a watery, soapy red up his cheek and under the lens of his already-steamed-up glasses, was more than a little inevitable. But then, Hank had never worried about such little things - not with the anatomies of birds and brains and solar systems assembling and reassembling themselves in his mind. A graze with a razor blade seemed far too insignificant.

Hank was sixteen, and had been encouraged to scrape his resolutely hairless cheeks by the jibes of other, darker, manlier boys. He hadn’t inherited his father’s thick mop of red hair, but his fair complexion seemed to have won through despite Hank’s greasy brown locks. Hank might have been muscular enough to compete on the track team, or in football, but the coaches had tended to view his oversized hands and feet as evidence of adolescent clumsiness. Hank had tended to agree, happy to accept the excuse. A sports scholarship to the Ivy League might have been welcome, but his brain would have rebelled. Besides, there was already an invitation waiting for him – a letter hastily stuffed back into its envelope, and then secreted inside his copy of _Newtonian Physics_.

The Xavier Institute. Hank hadn’t been impressed. He’d seen promotional literature from most of the best prep schools and colleges in the country, and the worst schools seemed to always affect the most foreign and prestigious names. The man himself, the Professor, was a mostly unknown quantity. Hank had found his name on microfiche in the library, attached to research from the Technion in Israel: counseling of traumatized children after the Yom Kippur war. Hank was fairly sure that he wasn’t traumatized, and doubly so that he didn’t need a quack psychiatrist to tell him that he was.

Hank snapped shut the book, hoping to end his thoughts of beasts on the Bethlehem road, and jumped to his feet. After wiping the blood from his face, he inspected the injury. Not deep enough to really impress the other boys. He’d need a blackened eye and split lip for that. Proper war wounds. But Hank’s father had never taken a baseball bat to anyone. He’d never needed to.

He washed his face in the sink, glasses laid to one side. In the mirror, between rivulets of water, even his unfocused eyes could see the blue tint creeping back into the roots of his hair. Always blue. Even red would have been better.

Hank reached for his mother’s hair dye, and thought again about the letter.

***

Things were peaceful down by the boathouse: deserted, unused. The river, which had only ever been a river by name, had dried up into a trickle of muddy water long ago. The boathouse itself, at the end of the wooden walkway leading up to its gates, was rotten and beaten by every storm – creaking resolutely in the wind, and somehow remaining upright. On winter nights it was a repository for ghosts and legends. In the summer, Jean would draw a splintered shard of wood from the ruins and proudly declare herself Arthur, King of the Britons. Hank had learned to chuckle and shake his head before retreating into his books. The Professor had been a good role model for a boy who so desperately wanted to distance himself from a girl only a few years younger.

In retrospect he must have been ridiculous to her – the oversized, awkward college boy who disappeared for months, and returned in a flurry of papers. Jean was no idiot herself, and would sometimes pinch one of his books and disappear with it for hours. Whether she understood any of it was a mystery, but she had made her point. Once Scott arrived on the scene, but a year or two younger than Jean, Hank thought he understood her quite well. It was much, much better to play at being the adult than to actually be the child.

“What’re you reading?”

“Nothing.” It was a reflex, formed out of the torments of school bullies and over-eager friends. Hank looked around and smiled apologetically. “I’m refreshing my memory of basic anatomy,” he said. “Maybe you would enjoy it. I know Jean…”

But Jason had already grabbed his hand, startling him out of finishing the thought. Hank closed his book and hesitated, unsure of what he should do. Jason was intently studying the back of his hand, his grip so tight it was numbing. The other boy had been fairly lucid during the past weeks, but Hank was well aware that anyone whose good periods were described as “lucid” had deeper problems than momentary antisocial behavior.

“Are you all right?” Hank had never been too good at dealing with younger children and, though Jason was almost his age, he had a childlike curiosity that put Hank on edge.

“What are you doing, hiding here?” Jason asked, and released Hank’s hand so suddenly that it smacked hard against Hank’s raised knee.

Hank rubbed his hand, more to have something to do than out of genuine hurt. “I’m not hiding. Charles always knows where we are.”

“Yes…” Jason’s smile lit up his eyes – mismatched blue and green, and he directed a finger towards Hank’s face. “The voice in your head. Can you feel him? Can you?” The finger hit home in the center of Hank’s forehead.

Hank tried one of Charles’ patented exasperated sighs, and put a hand on Jason’s ribs, intending to push him away. “Jason, he’s not in your head.”

“You know he fucks the magnet man at night, don’t you? Don’t you? All night long he’s screaming it to me.” Jason’s voice was a harsh whisper, his smile still impish. Around them, the wind seemed to blow a little harder. Hank’s book fell open. “Maybe you’d like him to fuck you too? Huh?”

“I…” Hank’s eyes hurt trying to watch Jason. He was too close, and Hank should be in charge. He should be authoritative. He should be the adult. But Jason was reaching out for the long, blue strands of hair Hank had tucked behind his ears, his hand warm, his lips almost…

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, beast man?” And Jason’s voice was strong, and loud, and _everything_ as Hank was suddenly not himself at all.

He woke up in darkness in the infirmary, hands immediately reaching out in desperation, wanting, needing to confirm that everything he had seen, everything he had felt, was just…

“Henry,” Erik said beside him, his voice reassuringly steady. “It was only an illusion.”

Hank ran pale fingers over the smooth, hairless skin of his forearm, and shivered at his own touch. “It wasn’t real,” he said to himself.

But there was an in-drawing of breath next to him. “There are some things we need to discuss.”

***

Hank’s feet pounded on the treadmill in a steady, heavy rhythm. He was too worn out by the events of the day to be more flight-footed. Sweat tickled his nose underneath his glasses, and he wondered if he still had some of that awful orange television makeup on, blocking up his pores. Every day since Ellis Island there had been another news crew demanding his input on mutant issues. Obviously one of them had picked his name out of a hat, or plucked it from a website, and the rest had simply followed suit. At this rate he was going to become lauded as the foremost expert on the field, although it was Charles who surely deserved that honor.

Thinking about it, it became very likely in Hank’s mind that it had been Charles who had promoted his name to the press. After all, the Institute could gain nothing from such direct publicity, and Erik could certainly do little in the way of interviews from wherever they were keeping him.

 _Christ_ , Hank thought, staring at himself in the gym’s mirror. _How on earth did it come to this?_

In the days, not so long ago, when he had worn a uniform and been ready to fight, he had been little more than the Xavier Institute’s security – a bit of muscle in case they had to rescue a child from abusive parents or, on the worst occasions, a mob. Erik could have stopped anyone, of course, but perhaps that was the point. Charles could tolerate the bruises and fractures Hank’s worst rages dispensed, but death was beyond any mitigation.

Erik could have killed everyone. The world leaders, their families, their secretaries, their bodyguards… All just _stopped_ by Erik’s machine. Hank met his own eyes in the mirror, and frowned just a little as he picked up the pace. Every interview he did, and every committee meeting, called for the denunciation of the Brotherhood’s activities. Hank could do that easily, although the hairs down his spine seemed to tingle whenever he saw Erik’s picture. Those eyes could always look straight through him, just as well as Jason had. Both of them had so effortlessly seen the reality behind the illusion.

“Doctor McCoy, isn’t it?”

The voice was friendly and familiar, although when Hank turned he realised that it was familiar for precisely the wrong reasons. Senator Robert Kelly was standing by the treadmill, beaming as he dragged a towel through graying blond hair.

“Senator.” Hank decided that he had had enough of running, and punched the stop button. “I’m finished here,” he said as the belt ground to a halt, hoping that Kelly merely wanted to use the machine.

Kelly’s smile, polished for the press, grew wider. “Excellent! I was hoping we could chat.”

“Oh really?” Hank headed for the locker room, determined to dowse his head in cold water. If it didn’t cool him off, at least it might deafen him slightly to Kelly’s attempts at conversation.

“Yes.” Kelly nimbly kept up with Hank’s pace. “You’re becoming quite a voice in Washington, Henry. The mutant issue is on everyone’s lips and minds. You could be quite influential. Although, of course I admire your impartiality.”

Hank stared at him, and turned on the water, wetting his hands in the basin. In recent weeks, Kelly had undergone a rapid about-turn on mutant rights, but words were much less important than deeds. “Thank you,” he muttered.

“Washington needs an educated voice on this matter. An instinctive desire for equality only takes a cause so far, particularly when Erik Lehnsherr is still on every news bulletin.” Kelly leaned against the marble sinks. “People fear for their children. This is nothing like believing racial minorities might be violent, or that homosexuals are child molesters. It’s easy enough to find an overwhelming number of counter-examples in both of those cases. But have you seen Magneto’s thugs? Sabertooth? Toad? Can you imagine trying to convince an ordinary American that people who look like that mean them no harm?”

“There have been freakshows since Biblical times, Senator,” Hank said, removing his glasses in order to wipe them. “Many children idolize the huge, grotesque wrestlers on primetime television. MTV contains many a young person who looks far stranger than Mortimer Toynbee. I tend to believe that we are by nature fascinated by the unusual, not repulsed by it. Unless, of course, we are taught to be.”

Kelly seemed to appreciate this sentiment. He leaned in closer, perhaps compensating for Hank’s near-sightedness. “You know, Henry, you’re quite a revelation yourself.”

“How so?” Hank quickly replaced his glasses – a stop-gap defensive measure against Kelly’s advances.

“I’ve seen you at hearings before. My overall impression of you was as a rather average, even slight, man. Someone who could be knocked over in the breeze…” Kelly gestured towards Hank. “But here you are, and not at all what I expected.”

Hank tried his most polite smile. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…” But Kelly had a hand on his arm – easy enough to shake off, but it stopped him for a moment.

“Indeed,” Kelly said, and glanced to the side, to the sink where water was still running. “But you’re the first scientist I’ve ever met who sheds blue… fur, is it?” He grinned at Hank’s sudden expression of panic, and patted his arm. “Don’t worry, Henry. After Ellis Island, it would take a lot to shock me.”

“I don’t know what this is,” Hank said, pulling away, and swiftly wiping up the stray hairs from the sink. “Maybe some teenager with a bad dye job.” He nervously swept his own sweat-dampened hair out of his eyes as he dumped the blue clump in the trash.

“Yes,” Kelly said, watching him. “This is a rather inconvenient location, isn’t it? Let’s… go somewhere.”

Hank followed him, and told himself he did it out of curiosity rather than fear.

***

Hank ducked under the crime scene tape that had been enthusiastically wrapped around the pillars at the end of the driveway, and adjusted his suit. The letter that gave him permission to be there, amongst all the debris, was tucked into his jacket pocket, but no one rushed forward to demand identification. Just as well. Treading down the tarmac path, he had more inclination to attack the national guardsmen milling around than to willingly submit to an interrogation, however brief.

 _Erik_ , he thought, seeing the splintered doorway, although he knew that it was all Stryker’s work. Breaking into a school in the middle of the night; abducting children; maybe killing them… Hank carefully entered the mansion, glass and wood shards crackling under his loafers. There was blood here. He could smell it.

Peter had wanted to come, to inspect the damage, to find out just how far Stryker and his men had penetrated. But Hank had told him to stay with the children. He had played the general – the role Charles had always fulfilled with much more conviction, even from a wheelchair. Still, Hank could be forceful when he had reason to be.

His hand closed around the cellphone in his pocket. Robert had been out of touch for days, leaving Hank with nothing but a cheerful voicemail message for consolation. It was usually difficult to spill his deepest problems and insecurities to a machine. Now it was impossible.

“Doctor McCoy.” The owner of an officious, military tone was an officious, military man, thrusting out a hand like a weapon. Hank shook it after a moment’s hesitation. “They say this is some kind of mutant training camp,” the officer said, looking around as if in disbelief.

Hank looked around too. “They say a lot of things.”

He could never remember the pain clearly enough to describe it. It was simply pain, and pain was all that there was. For what might have been a minute or a year, Hank saw and heard nothing. And then it all came rushing back. His knees were digging into the glass on the floor, hands pressing against his ears as if trying to block out an all-pervasive noise. It felt as if he hadn’t breathed in months.

“Are you all right?” the soldier asked, crouched down beside him, apparently genuinely concerned. Hank saw him mouth the words rather than heard the voice.

Slowly and cautiously, Hank removed his hands from his ears. As breath returned, so did feeling, and his knees were bleeding. “I think so.” He had enough sense not to blame his sudden collapse on a simple migraine, but no idea how to fumble for an alternative excuse.

When the soldiers started screaming, he knew it was time to leave.

***

Robert gave no excuse for the missing time, but he was smiling when he appeared at Hank’s door past midnight one Tuesday. “I hear you’ve been busy,” he said, overcoat folded over one arm, briefcase at his feet.

“Idle minds are a devil’s workshop,” Hank said. Unable to sleep, he had been watching debate footage on C-SPAN while clearing up some of the detritus the children had left behind.

“Indeed. Magneto’s escaped.” Robert’s voice had a conspiratorial air as he looked both ways along the empty corridor. “Stryker’s pet project has quite literally exploded. The man himself is nowhere to be found. And Xavier’s school is being rebuilt with a government grant and the President’s apologies.” The tips of his shoes brushed Hank’s. “About time for some positive action on our part, wouldn’t you say Henry?”

Hank took a breath. “William Stryker’s positive action is hardly an example to follow.”

Robert reached to remove Hank’s glasses. “I think you’re old enough to set your own examples, Doctor.” His eyes were a dazzling, perfect blue, even as the rest of the world was pulled out of focus.

In the darkness, later, Hank ran a furry thumb over three ridges scarring their way down Robert’s belly. Robert only laughed, and kissed him again.

***

They buried Jason by the boathouse, although there was nothing to bury but the few possessions and clothes of his that had remained at the school: a punk rock t-shirt, almost new denim jeans, a coffee-table book on Dali that Hank suspected had really belonged to someone else entirely. Neither of them said anything. Jean’s funeral had been an official affair, with speeches and verses and a stone cast in her memory. But Jason had been an inspiration to no one, and, in the end, an enemy to them all.

“A cruel fate,” Hank said, finally, because someone had to say something.

Charles must have been caught between two responses, because he opened his mouth, but shook his head and looked away.

Hank sat down on the grass, feeling awkward in his black suit. “I’m seeing someone,” he said.

A non-sequitur if there ever was one, but Charles was well used to incongruity. If anything, he seemed pleased by the change in subject. “Anyone I know?”

“Maybe.” Hank looked up, and squinted into the sun. “Yes,” he amended.

“Ah.” When no further information seemed to be forthcoming, Charles relaxed a little in his wheelchair. “I’m sure he’s a good man.”

Hank raised his eyebrows, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. “I’m not sure at all,” he replied. “He’s not what he seems.”

“Sadly, so few of us are.” Charles took a deep breath of the forest air, as if listening to some distant noise. “We’re missed back at the school.”

Hank raised his head and looked in the direction of the mansion as if he, too, could hear thoughts on the breeze. “I think I’ll stay out here for a while,” he said, fingers digging into the soft, mossy earth. “Pay my respects.”

“He was a cruel boy, Henry,” Charles said, making his chair turn around in a wide circle by the dry riverbank.

 _But honest_ , Hank thought. That had been the greatest cruelty of all.

***

Their alarms went off at the same time, playing discordant tunes that made him wake up with a particular kind of alert confusion. Robert, bless him, could sleep through anything. Hank raised a blue, oversized hand, and stroked his hair with sleepy resignation before heading for the shower.

The cold water served to wake him up completely, but not to give his thoughts any more order or cohesion. He had manila folders, indexed and highlighted and cross-referenced, all neatly stacked on his desk, but his memory had been paralyzed by fear.

Trying to read his bullet-points for discussion, he cut himself shaving. It smarted but he doubted that, today of all days, anyone would even notice, let alone care.

“You’re brilliant,” Robert said from the doorway, wearing Hank’s blue bathrobe and munching on a slice of watermelon. “You don’t need all of that.”

Hank envied his seemingly effortless confidence. “I think I agree with your latter point more than the former, Senator,” he said in his best professional tone. And then his shoulders dipped. “They’re not going to pay attention to what I say at all. How can the President take me seriously? I have _fangs_ , Robert. Who ever heard of a cabinet member with fangs?”

Robert cocked his head, amused. “I would think that having fangs would be a very good reason for him to take you seriously. He might fear for his life otherwise.”

“You really believe in this?” Hank asked, pulling on his jacket, and nodding towards the stack of folders. “A mutant in the government? You think it’ll work?”

“Better than a non-mutant trying to imagine what mutants are thinking. Better than you hiding behind a mask.”

“Sometimes masks are necessary,” Hank said with a sigh.

In the mirror he saw a man he barely recognized: the blue skin, the wild hair, the blinding white, razor sharp teeth. It was a man he had seen in glimpses over the years, in the bleary moments before and after sleep, around the edges of Erik’s greatest deception. He almost scared himself.

When he kissed Robert goodbye at the door of his apartment, it felt as if the world was watching him. There was no one in the hallway – no small child, no cat, no angry, disturbed crowd. He suspected that they would all be there soon enough.

“The hour has come at last,” Robert said softly, and, as Hank turned to leave, he didn’t mind at all that, for an instant, those sparkling blue eyes had flashed an unnatural yellow.

He walked slowly down the long hallway, briefcase gripped in one hand.

It was time.


End file.
